Notebook News: Wi-Fi City, Fire Proof PowerBook, NEC Notebook, ShaggyMac Cleaning Products

Philadelphia plansto cover 135 square miles with WiFi

Philadelphia, the city ofbrotherly love,is considering a plan that, for a price of about $10 million dollars, would turn the city into the world's largest largest wireless internet hotspot. Now that's what I call love! Even better though,the city is considering making the 135 square miles of WiFi coverage free to use. Even if the city ends up charging for access, the price is expected to be quite low,significantly lower than the prices being charged by commercial outlets.

The U.S. has actually been falling behind in recent months for the adoption of broadband internet, mostly due to the high monthly costs and lack of good competition among broadband providers that would bring prices down and bandwidth up. For Philadelphia to do this would be a great stride in getting the adoption rate of broadband up, and making the city more of a high-tech hub. Fingers crossed Philly follows through on this!

Apple PowerBook G4 Survives an Inferno

Apple never made any claims as to whether their PowerBook G4 is fireproof, in fact no notebook manufacturer makes such a laptop. But a woman that experienced an apartment fire earlier this week found that everything she owned was burnt to a crisp in her apartment after fire raged through it, that is everything except for her PowerBook. Check out this insane picture:

Inside Burnt Out Apartment

The Apple PowerBook G4 post-fire

The PowerBook reportedly was able to boot up after the fire.

Link to more pictures: http://www.progsoc.org/~arh/sophie/FieryPowerbook/

NEC $4,000 Rugged Laptop Released in Japan

NEC released a notebook in Japan last week that's able to survive a 3 foot drop, withstand temperatures of 131 degrees Fahrenheit and be both waterproof and dustproof too. Well, waterproof to things such as rain, don't take this laptop swimming with you. The NEC rugged notebook weighs 6 pounds. The cost? $4,000 or so, ouch!

Press Release: http://www.nec.co.jp/press/ja/0408/2702.html(Japanese)

AMD64Notebooks.com Reviews the Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO A1630

AMD64Notebooks.com, a site dedicated to covering AMD 64-bit processor based notebooks, has posted an overview and benchmarks of the Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO A1630 notebook. This notebook is a 15.4" Widescreen style machine with an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor and128MB ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card so you can bet there's some nice performance squeezed out of this machine:

Link to review and benchmarks: http://www.amd64notebooks.com/reviews/fsa1630/index.php

ShaggyMac.com Releases new Laptop Cleaning and Care Products

ShaggyMac.com (www.shaggymac.com) is an online store that sells laptop screen protectors, cleaners and a range of other notebook cleaning and protection accessories. Now ShaggyMac has added the products Grubby Sticks and the Mini LCD Wipe tocompliment their range of laptop care products. The ShaggyMac Laptop Sceen Protector has already proved to be a popular accessory among the PowerBook & iBook users. Grubby Sticks are used to swipe out all of the gunk, grunge, crud, and anything else you may encounter burrowed in the keyboard. Unlike many other similar products, Grubby Sticks are not saturated with harmful solvents. In fact they are engineered for safe cleaning of all sensitive surfaces. Grubby Sticks come packaged chemical-free. They retail $5.95 for a 12 pack. http://shaggymac.com/cleaners.html#grubbysticks The ShaggyMac Mini LCD Wipe is a versatile cloth made with millions of ultra-microfibers. This will flawlessly polish any LCD screen and may be used wet or dry. An iKlear Apple Polish single is included free with every ShaggyMac Mini LCD Wipe, which retails for $4.95. http://shaggymac.com/cleaners.html#miniwipe